Selling by the Carload: The Early Years of Fast Food in C

7Selling by the Carload: The EarlyYears of Fast Food in CanadaSteve Penfold

On 1 June 1967, as North Americans discovered hippies, as youth geared upfor the famous Summer of Love, and as Canadians looked forward to anoptimistic season of Centennial celebrations, George Tidball began his sum-mer of hamburgers. A year before, Tidball had left his job as a managementconsultant rather than accept an unwanted transfer from Vancouver to Cleve-land. He had few immediate prospects, but his wife remembered a populardrive-in restaurant from their days in Chicago and suggested that Vancou-ver needed one. The restaurant was called McDonald’s, then an American-wide chain of almost 1,000 outlets, but it was known to Canadians onlythrough American television and the accounts of travellers who had en-countered the company’s eighteen-cent hamburgers. With a group of part-ners, Tidball secured a licence from the chain and formed McCan FranchisesLtd. to develop McDonald’s restaurants across western Canada.1

For their first location, McCan found a lot at No. 3 Road and BennettRoad in Richmond, a burgeoning suburb of Vancouver. Thanks to improvedbridges across the Fraser River, No. 3 Road was fast developing into a “trans-portation artery between the bulk of the residential area of Richmond andthe employment and cultural areas in Vancouver,” so the new outlet seemednicely placed to draw traffic from across the area.2 More strikingly, Rich-mond was exactly the kind of community that the American parent held inmystical esteem. “McDonald’s is set up to serve local families, not highwaytransients,” a company advertisement claimed, “and the ideal location for aMcDonald’s is a solid, substantial family community with plenty of churches,schools, shopping centers, and residential streets.” Brimming with young,middle-class families living in detached houses along quiet suburban streetslike Bennett Road, Richmond was the perfect McCommunity.3

The residents of Bennett Road seemed less enthusiastic about McDonald’sthan McDonald’s was about them. Six months before the outlet opened, adelegation of nineteen local homeowners implored Town Council to keep

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McDonald’s out, fearing for the aesthetic and moral peace of their neigh-bourhood. Residents knew what to expect from a “drive-in” restaurant: all-night noise, increased traffic, blowing garbage, and worst of all, the “hoodlumelement.” Town officials were sympathetic and referred the issue to variouscommittees, but in the end they were impotent. Planning staff negotiatedan agreement with McCan to alter the parking-lot layout and to close at11:00 p.m. every night, but they were powerless to refuse a building permit.“We could have had a far better and more comprehensive business,” notedReeve Harry Anderson, “but the property was zoned Commercial ServiceDistrict and there’s nothing we can do about it.”4

In retrospect, the new outlet on No. 3 Road seemed to mark the first stepin a new fast food order. Over the subsequent decade McDonald’s swept tothe top of the Canadian fast food ladder with remarkable speed. In 1977the chain’s 250 outlets spanned the country, and its annual revenues al-most equalled the combined sales of its closest three competitors.5 Fiveyears later the company proudly announced a distressing indicator of thenew McContinent: 93 percent of Canadian children believed that John A.Macdonald was the “guy who makes the hamburgers.”6 By that time, infact, McDonald’s was in the vanguard of an emerging global mass culture.As the company’s first international outlet, McDonald’s Richmond locationrepresented the first step toward the chain’s status as a symbol of this newreality.7

Yet McDonald’s ultimate triumph should not obscure the fact that, at thetime, its arrival in Richmond seemed a mere continuation of existing trends.At a significant moment in Canadian business history, Tidball followed thewell-worn strategy of importing American ideas into the Canadian market.McDonald’s came across the border some years behind early innovators likeDairy Queen ice cream, Dog ‘N Suds hot dog stands, A&W Drive-Ins, RedBarn Hamburgers, Mister Donut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken – Americancompanies that had been dotting the Canadian roadside since the late 1950s.Moreover, McDonald’s ultimate triumph was hardly obvious in 1967, as thechain was simply one more company colonizing the Canadian roadsidewith quick-service food outlets.

In fact, this was precisely how the residents of Bennett Road viewed thenew McDonald’s: as one of many nuisances that they had to confront intheir increasingly hectic suburban lives. Neighbourhood worries about noise,garbage, and hoodlums suggested that some middle-class families had cometo think of drive-in restaurants as offering not simply a particular mix ofconvenience, affordability, and informality, but also an all-too-predictablesocial dynamic. From this perspective, the new McDonald’s seems a goodlesson in the link between business institutions, social history, and popularculture. McDonald’s and other fast food companies expressed several key

164 Selling by the Carload

elements of postwar consumption. Their religious commitment to servingmiddle-income families, their locations on urban fringes, their large parkinglots along busy thoroughfares like No. 3 Road, their limited menus of cheap,easy-to-prepare foods, and their informal surroundings spoke to broadertrends in postwar Canada. For fast food companies, these trends crystallizedinto the idea of “selling by the carload,” of reaching not just individualconsumers but also increasingly mobile, middle-class families. But fast foodoutlets also became the touchstone for another postwar social dynamic, thegeneration gap, since all the strategies for selling by the carload – informalsurroundings, large parking lots, inexpensive food – attracted young pa-trons who promised to drive the families away. Although it tapped power-ful trends in postwar society, selling by the carload was no easy proposition.

“Families Dashing Off Somewhere Want to Eat in a Hurry”The term “fast food” was coined in the 1950s, but even when McDonald’sarrived in Canada, it was not commonly used. Like residents of BennettRoad, when Canadians talked about what we now call fast food outlets, theyusually called them “drive-in restaurants.” Nor was “fast food” used pre-cisely or consistently, although it generally referred to some combinationof four basic features: limited menu, rigidly defined production system, paperservice, and roadside location. At the same time, these specific features wereoften less important than fast food’s overall symbolic impact.

Since the mid-1970s the mission of fast food companies has been to ex-pand their product offerings, but in the early days they specialized in lim-ited menus of easy-to-prepare and easy-to-eat fare, rarely more than a dozenitems including sandwiches, fries, and drinks. Hamburgers and chicken werethe most common items on fast food menu boards, but secondary productsincluded donuts, fish and chips, roast beef sandwiches, and pizza (see Table7.1). Up to 1975 these secondary products did not secure wide appeal. Themost surprising failure was fish and chips, which had been popular in manymarkets for several years. In the 1930s, for example, Toronto had so manyfish and chips shops that they were listed separately in the city directory; adecade later, Victoria’s twelve establishments claimed to serve twenty tonsof fish and thirty-six tons of chips every week. But attempts to integrate fishand chips into Canada’s fast food revolution left a string of spectacular fail-ures: P.K. Fish and Chips, Davy Jones, H. Salt, Arthur Treacher’s, and others.8

Whatever their product, fast food outlets were built for speed. In a typicalboast, Big Ben’s in Burnaby, British Columbia, promised to serve fifteen-cent hamburgers to a family of four within two minutes. “We take the mostpopular foods [and] put their preparation and serving on an assembly linebasis,” bragged Red Barn’s Harold Shneer, borrowing a popular phrase fromMcDonald’s president Ray Kroc.9 The claim was more than rhetoric. Withvarious levels of enthusiasm and enforcement, fast food operators defined

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and refined a “system” of production that squeezed speed and efficiencyout of even the smallest operations. Cooking procedures were carefully timed,and even simple steps like adding ketchup and mopping floors were regu-lated and standardized. To describe these innovations, invoking Ford wasmore symbolically striking than descriptively accurate since few fast foodoutlets were large enough to accommodate real assembly lines (although afew experimented with automated broilers),10 and their strategies had muchbroader genealogies in the development of mass production. In fact, as so-ciologist Ester Reiter points out, fast food owed much more to FrederickTaylor than to Henry Ford. Back in Ford’s time, Taylor had conducted de-tailed experiments on work, carefully charting workers’ movements to im-prove efficiency, eliminate discretion from labour processes, and codify everytask into a series of rules that management could control and enforce. Longafter Taylor’s death, fast food companies applied his agenda to the ham-burger with considerable vigour.11

When fast food emerged from this factory-like system, it was passed to thecustomer in disposable containers. Whatever their product, fast food outletsdispensed with plates and utensils, serving in bags, boxes, cartons, cardboardbuckets, and foil wrappers. From the operator’s standpoint, paper servicemeant no dishes to wash and no money lost to “breakage.” From a broaderperspective, paper service entailed a different relationship to neighbourhoodand customer. When Bennett Road residents worried that McDonald’s wouldturn the area into a “great big garbage dump,” they echoed standard com-plaints from across the country. “Drive-in restaurants are an abomination,”Scarborough, Ontario, resident David Steward told his Town Council in1967, “a dog’s playground covered with chicken bones and paper napkins.”12

Managing garbage was not a trivial concern: journalists often noticed thesize of the garbage bins as much as the food, so companies tried to enforcestrict standards of cleanliness. For operators unwilling to clean up, city

Table 7.1

Estimated share of fast food dollar volume by foodtype, 1970

Food %

Chicken 32.0Hamburgers 29.0Ice cream 23.5Donuts 4.5Pizza 3.5Hot dogs 3.0Other* 4.5

* Includes fish and chips (2%), pancakes (1.5%), and roast beef (1%).Source: Canadian Hotel and Restaurant, 15 March 1970, 43-44.


councils often stepped in to force the issue. In 1966 Winnipeg passed astrict new antilitter law, which required businesses offering paper service toclean their garbage off public and private property within 100 yards of theoutlet.13

Paper service also entailed a different notion of serving the consumer,one that links to the fourth characteristic of fast food. Customers were ex-pected to eat in the relative privacy of their cars, so they could have easilydriven off with plates and utensils. In the early days, everything about fastfood outlets – architecture, signage, products, and service – seemed designedto grab fast-moving automobiles. Few companies sought out downtownlocations until the mid-1970s, preferring roadside sites on metropolitan andurban fringes. Along the roadside, pylon signs were designed for maximumefficiency in attracting motoring customers: they were tall, brightly lit, anddisplayed a minimum number of words and were often spinning or sur-rounded by flashing lights, all meant to attract attention at forty miles anhour. Red Barn required outlets to be visible from 500 feet away since cus-tomers needed time to see the sign, slow down, and pull in. Once theystopped, consumers found enormous parking lots. Companies often lookedfor an acre of land, but the buildings themselves were small, typically be-tween 1,200 and 1,600 square feet, including the production area. Insidethe outlet, interior seating space was limited, if it existed at all. As we’ll see,some prewar roadside restaurants (like Nat Bailey’s Vancouver-area WhiteSpot) eventually expanded to include tables, counters, and dining rooms,but until the late 1960s fast food chains typically expected customers to eatin their cars or take their food home. Red Barn’s early outlets had twelveseats, but their design – moulded chairs with small, attached half-desks pain-fully familiar to anyone who has suffered through an undergraduate lecture– were hardly meant to encourage lingering. When it arrived in Canada,McDonald’s had no seats at all.14

Serving the car took many forms. At industry-leading A&W and numer-ous independent operations, carloads of customers were served by “carhops,”usually young women, who brought orders out to cars. Labour costs were achronic problem, so many operators experimented with electronic order-ing in the hope that, by reducing the number of trips to the car, they couldcut back on staff.15 Up-and-coming chains like Red Barn and McDonald’ssimply dispensed with carhops, building self-serve outlets where customershad to park, order at a walk-up window, and return to their cars with foodin hand. A few places, such as Royal Burger in Ottawa and the independentFrontier Drive-In in St. Catharines, used an early version of drive-thru ser-vice, although this seems to have been relatively rare until the late 1970s.16

With outlets designed to serve automobiles, it should come as no surprisethat many observers saw fast food as a symptom of a faster society, whereeverybody was rushed, on the move, and less rooted in local communities.

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“The phenomenal growth of fast food outlets in our fast-paced society is nosurprise,” a suburban reporter commented in 1971. “Ever-hungry teenagerswant a fast snack. Families dashing off somewhere want to eat in a hurry.”17

Of course, every generation since the railway had lamented the accelera-tion of daily life,18 but in the postwar period more and more families weredashing off somewhere in automobiles. Motor vehicle registrations in Can-ada more than doubled between 1945 and 1952, and they doubled again by1964, far outpacing population growth in this period.19 Car ownership con-tinued to vary widely by region, type of municipality, and income, but itpenetrated more deeply into the population across the country with eachpassing year. By the time McDonald’s arrived in Canada, all but two prov-inces averaged one car per household.20 Canadians did not simply integratethe car into their daily lives – they used it to transform them, adjustingfamily economies, rethinking housing possibilities, and reimagining thescope of mobility. These impulses reinforced, and were reinforced by, a wholeconstellation of government policies, pursued without much explicit co-ordination at every level of government, which smoothed the way for theautomobile by widening roads, building bridges and superhighways, up-rooting existing neighbourhoods, and even inventing new trade regimes.21

McDonald’s first Canadian outlet, opened June 1967, Richmond, British Columbia.At this point, the standard McDonald’s outlet had no indoor seats. Customerstypically ate in the car or took their food home. Six garbage cans are visible in thephoto. McDonald’s and other fast food outlets had to constantly battle blowinggarbage.City of Richmond Archives, 1987 61 3


Yet cars had been transforming Canadian life since before the war, and road-side commerce had a longer history as well.

The Fast Food Gaze“This is a country on the move,” Restaurants and Institutions commented in1956, “and because of this, road-side services have increased not only innumber but, like the automobile, in sleekness and comfort. Motels, restau-rants, service stations hedge our busy main roads, jostling for business andthe favours of passers-by.”22 If carloads of hungry Canadians were on themove by 1956, this was because fast food chains had come to Canada at theend of a long evolution in roadside foodservice. Until about 1960 the res-taurants “jostling for the favours of passers-by” remained ad hoc, local, andlargely individual in organization. As car ownership increased in the earlydecades of the century (tripling between the end of the First World War andthe beginning of the Depression), “auto gypsies” initially stopped at theroadside to eat, sleep, camp, and picnic.23 Other travellers stopped at estab-lished restaurants with central locations in cities and towns since main high-ways still passed through downtown commercial sections. Any travellerapproaching London, Ontario, on Highway 2 would have to slow down longenough to drive the length of the city’s main street before proceeding on toWindsor or Toronto. Downtown restaurants, then, drew some passing tour-ists in addition to their core market, the “hundreds of businessmen andgirls, bank clerks and others, whose time for eating is limited and who ap-preciate good food, served well in attractive surroundings.”24

In between well-established communities, entrepreneurs soon respondedto the growing network of drivers with ad hoc and haphazard efforts tocapture the passers-by. Some gas station owners broadened their businessinto basic foodservice, either by offering simple meals in a cramped cornerof their existing facility or by expanding the lot to accommodate a special-ized eating area. “Auto courts” – a business offering camping space andoccasionally cabin accommodation for automobile tourists – dotted theapproaches to many cities and sometimes added restaurants to their offer-ings.25 The most direct forerunners of fast food were individual entrepre-neurs who set up roadside foodservice between the wars in hopes of grabbingthe passing-by trade, often just on the edge of cities and towns. Buildingsand menus were usually simple, and business was often seasonal since traf-fic dropped considerably in the winter.26 In 1920 Nat Bailey set up a mobilefood stand on South West Marine Drive outside of Vancouver, selling hotdogs and ice cream to passing motorists on Sundays. A decade later, he builta more permanent structure just outside the Vancouver city limits. At theother end of the country, Salter Innes opened a small drive-in outside Hali-fax in 1930, serving hot dogs and ice cream from a 100-square-foot shack

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beside a provincial highway. In London, Ontario, Earl Nichols couldn’t af-ford a downtown location but soon discovered that his lot on WharncliffeRoad was perfectly located to capture a new market: tourists and local mo-torists who would drive a few extra blocks to take advantage of “curb ser-vice,” where the car could be pulled up to the front of the restaurant, foodcould be ordered right from the driver’s seat, and the meal could be deliv-ered by a carhop in short order. The transient market soon formed the bulkof Nichols’ business. By the late 1940s only 5 percent of Nichols’ quarter-million annual customers arrived from the local neighbourhood.27

Over time, such fringe eateries became staples of the “approach strip,”where numerous automobile-oriented businesses served drivers on the wayin and out of town.28 But despite complaints about the quality and reliabil-ity of these roadside eateries – concerns that would later be crystallized intothe evocative term “food-easy” by industry observers29 – the business ofserving the car was the territory of local businesses rather than extensivechain restaurants until well into the postwar period. Efforts by chains toestablish themselves at roadsides were few and largely unsuccessful. In 1929a company called English Inns announced ambitious plans to build a chainof ten outlets along main tourist routes on both sides of the New York-Ontario border, combining motel accommodation, a fine dining room, anda quick-service lunch counter. The effort was unsuccessful, and the companywas bankrupt by 1931.30 Meanwhile, existing restaurant chains – outfits likeHoney Dew, Muirhead’s, and Murray’s that had outlets in several cities acrossthe country – stuck to their traditional eating-out market in downtowncommercial and office areas, leaving the fringes to small entrepreneurs.31

The first phase of establishing chains at roadside saw a few entrepreneursextend the drive-in philosophy of fringe locations and mobile customersafter the war. Prewar drive-in operators often expanded their businesses butalmost never tried to grow beyond their original, individual outlet. Nichols,for example, had diversified his menu and expanded the restaurant fivetimes by 1947, increasing capacity from 24 to 103 seats to supplement hisquick-lunch counter service, and he had paved a twenty-car parking lot atthe side of the building. After his original outlet burned down in 1938, Innesadded a dance hall, a dining room, and other attractions to his Sunnysidedrive-in, which soon became a popular leisure spot for wartime youth. By1950 business was good enough that the outlet’s new owners began to openall year. But neither Nichols nor Innes grew beyond his original outlet.32

After the war, however, a few entrepreneurs built small chains that spannedlocal markets: Frank and Leo Fortin opened four Hi-Ho Drive-Ins (the firstin 1938) around Windsor, Ontario, while Nat Bailey slowly expanded hisWhite Spot drive-in empire in Greater Vancouver, jumping the water to setup in Victoria in 1961 and growing to eleven outlets by the late 1960s.


These local chains illustrated both a new phase and the relative backward-ness of the Canadian drive-in industry. Although larger than single outletoperations like Three Little Pigs, these chains paled beside the most progres-sive American companies like Howard Johnson’s, Dairy Queen, and A&W,which already had dozens of outlets throughout the United States by themid-1950s.33

While journalists were often impressed by the assembly-line productionof chains like McDonald’s, what distinguished Canadian drive-ins from thelarger American chains was not just the efficiency of their operations butalso the scope of their imagination. In fact, drive-in entrepreneurs like theFortins took operations seriously, laying out efficient, streamlined proce-dures, attending restaurant conventions to learn about the latest innova-tions, and so on. White Spot restaurants under Nat Bailey sold so manychickens that the company integrated back into chicken farming. In St.Catharines, Ralph Markarian of the Linehaven Drive-In decided that thebest way to improve his operation was to learn from the most efficient as-sembly line in town, so he hired a General Motors engineer to streamlinehis tiny hamburger stand.34 But however much they modernized, integrated,and improved their operations, hardly any of even the most sophisticatedCanadian operators spread beyond the confines of a single metropolitanarea before the late 1950s. As late as January 1959, then, the Financial Postcould reasonably observe that “the standard menu, standard service type ofroadside spot of the U.S. has no counterpart here.”35

No one would have dared to make such a claim a half-decade later. “‘Boom-ing’ aptly describes what the chain-operated drive-in business is doing inCanada these days,” Restaurants and Institutions reported in 1964, “and fromall reports there are no signs of this upsurge diminishing.”36 While a fewdrive-in chains – A&W, Dairy Queen, and Tastee Freez, for example – hadbeen trickling into Canadian foodservice in the second half of the 1950s,the pace of chain development increased considerably in 1959 (see Table7.2). Surveying the drive-in scene in the mid-1950s, trade magazines pro-filed local operators like Barney Strassburger in Kitchener, Ralph Markarianin St. Catharines, and Joe Young in Saskatoon. In the following decade,even before McDonald’s arrived, stories on such local innovators gave wayto coverage of early chains like Red Barn, A&W, Mister Donut, and Ken-tucky Fried Chicken – companies that reached out beyond a single city al-most as soon as they began Canadian operations. From its Winnipegheadquarters, A&W of Canada grew from its first outlet in 1956 to fortyoutlets, stretching from Victoria to Montreal, four years later. By 1966 RedBarn Hamburgers of Canada was only three years old but already had out-lets across southern Ontario, with a branch operation in Alberta and plansto expand to the Maritimes.37

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Fast food arrived in Canada along the same paths as most other twentieth-century economic developments, migrating north of the border as branchplants or Canadian-owned versions of American mass-production outlets. Ofthe fourteen companies that controlled two-thirds of chain outlets in Can-ada by 1970, twelve came from the United States.38 The most direct route,and probably the most numerous, saw a small Canadian entrepreneur buyan individual franchise from an existing American operation (or its Canad-ian subsidiary). A second approach was for Canadian entrepreneurs to pur-chase a territorial franchise from an established American company andthen sell outlets to smaller operators in specific areas or simply operate theoutlets themselves. Territories could vary in size from a specific city to thewhole country. George Hansen of Kentville, Nova Scotia, already ownedtwo independent roadside ice cream stands when he purchased the Maritimes

Table 7.2

Fast food/drive-in chains established in Canada, 1955-65

First CanadianChain Year Product outlet

Dairy Queen 1955 Ice cream Niagara Falls, ONA&W 1956 Root beer/ Winnipeg, MB

fast foodTastee Freez 1958 Ice cream n/aKentucky Fried Chicken 1959 Fried chicken Saskatoon, SKDog ’N Suds 1959 Root beer/ Saskatoon, SK

hot dogsChicken Delight 1959 Chicken Winnipeg, MBJohnny Johnson’s 1959 Hamburgers Scarborough, ONHarvey’s 1959 Hamburgers Richmond Hill, ONRoyal Burger 1959 Hamburgers Ottawa, ONBurger Chef 1961 Hamburgers OntarioHenry’s 1961 Hamburgers OntarioFrostop 1961 Root beer/ Manitoba

fast foodDunkin’ Donuts 1961 Donuts Montreal, QCMister Donut 1962 Donuts North York, ONTim Hortons Drive-In 1962 Hamburgers Scarborough, ONTim Hortons Donuts 1963 Donuts Scarborough, ONAunt Jemima Kitchens 1962 Pancakes Scarborough, ONRed Barn Systems 1963 Hamburgers Scarborough, ONCountry Style Donuts 1963 Donuts Toronto, ONDairy Belle 1964 Ice cream n/a

Note: “Chain” refers to a business that grew to multiple outlets beyond a single metropolitanmarket. Canadian chains are in italics.Sources: Canadian Hotel and Restaurant, Restaurants and Institutions, Financial Post.


franchise for Tastee Freez in 1957. He subsequently converted his existingoutlets to the chain logo and had added four new locations by 1960. HaroldShneer had even bigger aspirations. Shneer spent a year researching US fran-chise opportunities before he purchased the Canadian rights to Red BarnSystems of Springfield, Ohio. In July 1963 he opened his first hamburgeroutlet in Scarborough, Ontario, and then sold other franchises to smalleroperators like Frank Vetere, a former corporate executive who had yearnedto go out on his own. For the Canadian rights to the hamburger chain,Shneer paid an up-front fee and promised to forward a percentage of hisannual sales to Red Barn’s American headquarters. When McDonald’s fi-nally came north in 1967, Ray Kroc created two Canadian master franchises,one outside of Ontario under George Tidball and one for Ontario underGeorge Cohon. Eventually, Kroc bought the rights back from both entre-preneurs and created a single Canadian subsidiary under Cohon.39

These extensions of US firms were supplemented by a handful of Canad-ian operations. Yet many of these “home-grown” companies showed con-spicuous American influence. Harvey’s president George Sukornyk was abig player in the fast food game by Canadian standards. The hamburgerchain started in 1959 and grew impressively (from twenty-five outlets inOntario and Quebec in 1966 to forty-eight in 1968 and seventy-six by 1970).But Sukornyk was not an innovator, having taken over Harvey’s after twoyears of “intensive research” of US hamburger chains.40 In donuts, TimHortons began after company founder Jim Charade toured Mister Donut’sBoston headquarters and decided that, based on his experience running adonut plant for Vachon Foods and his observations of the American opera-tion, he could start his own chain instead. Returning to Toronto, Charadeopened his first donut shop, called Your Donuts, on Lawrence Avenue Eastin Scarborough in 1963. The following year, he and partner Tim Hortonopened their first franchised outlet on Ottawa Street in Hamilton.41

American chains made a few adjustments to the Canadian market, butonly a few. McDonald’s bowed to Canadian tastes by adding vinegar tofrench fry condiments. Other adjustments were not so simple. Red Barn’sinitial plans to simply import American procedures had to be rethought,particularly for choosing locations. Compared to the United States, Canadawas a poorer country whose large centres of population were scattered thinlyand separated by hundreds of miles, requiring more careful local-marketstudies. The company also discovered that Canadians were more “conserva-tive” hamburger eaters, particularly concerning the distance they were will-ing to drive, so the estimated market area of an outlet was shrunk from fourmiles in the US to two miles in Canada.42 These wrinkles should be weighedagainst claims about similarity and homogeneity. Some fast food capitalistssuggested that regional boundaries within each country were harder to crossthan the 49th parallel. “I can go into Alabama and feel more out of place

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than I do in Canada,” noted Mister Donut’s David Slater, whose chain wasconcentrated in the north-east United States and southern Ontario.43

McDonald’s discovered that local wrinkles often disappeared over time.“Every region seems to have its own preference for a particular condimentor flavor,” commented McDonald’s Alberta supervisor, Jared Kaufman, “butpeople everywhere soon come to prefer our way. It doesn’t take long for thenumber of special grilling orders to level off and then decline.”44

Kaufman may have been right, but in Canada “people everywhere” stilldid not have access to a McDonald’s. Up to about 1975 the reach ofMcDonald’s in Canada was somewhat limited, and McDonald’s ultimatevictory in the fast food war was hardly clear. In Canada the company got offto a late start and was actually losing money on its forty-three outlets whenthe chain consolidated Canadian operations under George Cohon in 1971.Only with increased capital from the American parent and a dramatic cutin prices (itself a risky attempt to attract Canadian consumers) did the seedsof McDonald’s hegemony become clear: high per-outlet revenues, rapidgrowth (McDonald’s of Canada gained quickly on existing leaders like A&Wand Kentucky Fried Chicken), and increasingly sophisticated marketing (itwas already using television to advertise to children, and its Canadian ad-vertising budget would be $2 million by 1973).45 South of the border, thechain was facing stiff challenges from companies like Burger Chef and BurgerKing, both backed by deep-pocketed food conglomerates. Indeed, corpo-rate buyouts seemed the wave of the future as the capital requirements infast food went up and existing food companies moved to establish a pres-ence in the burgeoning fast food sector. Pilsbury took over Burger King,General Foods purchased Burger Chef, Servomation (a vending machinecompany) bought out Red Barn, and International Multifoods acquiredMister Donut. The list goes on, with echoes in Canada. General Foods boughtWhite Spot, and Cara Foods entered the fast food market with Zumburger,its own creation. In the end, conglomeration was not the wave of the future– chains like Zumburger were largely unsuccessful, and the companies thatstayed independent typically did the best – but this was not clear until later.46

In the early 1970s, moreover, the standardizing power of fast food re-mained partial since chains still grew on a regional basis, reflecting a com-bination of historical trajectories of companies and regional differences indisposable incomes and population patterns (see Table 7.3). American chainsoften found an initial base in the hometown of the Canadian entrepreneurwho brought them north – Saskatoon, for example, for Dog ’N Suds andToronto for Red Barn. And because they tended to cluster outlets, only a fewcompanies reached out beyond their original regional base. In 1964 RedBarn opened outlets in Calgary through a partnership with a group of localentrepreneurs who claimed that they would “saturate the West with out-lets,” but the few western outlets that actually opened did not survive the


decade.47 Dog ’N Suds spread as far as Atlantic Canada in its first decade butoperated almost half of its outlets in its home province of Saskatchewan.Even companies with national coverage were often decentralized in someway. By 1970 Dairy Queen spanned the nation, but control was dividedbetween a company in eastern Canada (231 outlets) and one in the West(93 outlets). When McDonald’s arrived in Canada, then, only a few chains,like Kentucky Fried Chicken (135 outlets in all provinces by 1966) and A&W(158 outlets in 1966) had any real national presence.48

Yet the terms “national presence” and “regional basis” obscure as muchas they reveal. To fast food companies, Canada was not so much a countryas an archipelago of metropolitan and urban areas. Fast food companiesnormally entered an area by clustering outlets in major metropolitan mar-kets before branching out.49 When one trade magazine surveyed the largestfast food firms in 1968, most had located the bulk of their outlets in largecities (see Table 7.4). Of course, many companies also reported a number ofoutlets in smaller cities, but until at least the late 1970s a population of30,000 seems to have been the key threshold (although it was never abso-lute). “Too many problems with small-town operations,” commented RedBarn’s Harold Shneer. “Many of them are marginal, and marginal is a nasty

Table 7.3

Regional distribution of selected fast food chains in Canada, 1970

Prairie AtlanticChain BC provinces ON QC provinces Total

Kentucky Fried Chicken 25 72 147 30 31 305A&W 45 77 76 27 12 237Dairy Queen – – 132 77 22 231

(eastern Canada)a

Dairy Queen 46 47 – – – 93(western Canada)a

Harvey’s Hamburgers – 1 40 33 2 76Red Barn Hamburgers – – 41 – – 41Dog ’N Sudsb 12 17 1 – 5 35McDonald’s 12 7 10 – – 29

(two companies)c

Mister Donut – 1 18 8 – 27Country Style Donuts – – 21 – – 21Tim Hortons Donuts – – 16 – – 16

Note: “Chain” refers to a company that opened outlets in more than one metropolitan area.Chains founded in Canada are in italics.a At this time, Dairy Queen outlets in Canada were operated by two separate companies, one

covering central and eastern Canada and one covering the Prairies and British Columbia.b Franchised units only. An additional eight units were company-owned.c In 1970 McDonald’s was still split into two companies in Canada.Source: Canadian Hotel and Restaurant, 15 March 1970, 43-44.

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word to us.”50 In places below 30,000 people, the fast food market, when itwas exploited at all, was left to limited-menu chains like Dairy Queen (whichhad very small requirements for population, but these outlets generally servedonly ice cream and closed in the winter) and to a lesser degree KentuckyFried Chicken; the remainder of the market went to an assortment of inde-pendent operators. The idea of fast food could travel to communities with-out actual outlets – Canadians might visit a McDonald’s or Red Barn whileon vacation or hear about one through radio and television commercials –but these demographic targets had important consequences for understand-ing fast food’s influence. While urban and metropolitan populations weregaining consistently in the postwar years, even by 1966, 44 percent of Can-adians lived in communities too small to support a typical chain outlet.Leaving aside fast food’s actual development, then, almost half of Canad-ians lived in communities where most fast food companies couldn’t evenimagine opening an outlet. In some areas of the country, particularly in theMaritimes, the figure was much higher, but even in Ontario fully one-thirdof the population lived well outside fast food’s “gaze” (see Table 7.5).51

Within this urban archipelago, fast food’s impact was further limited.Few outlets, whether chain or independent, located in urban downtownsuntil the mid-1970s, and on the fringes chains did not yet dominate thevisual landscape, even along the busiest thoroughfares. Certainly, more andmore chain outlets appeared on commercial strips, particularly in core met-ropolitan markets in southern Ontario and the Lower Mainland of BritishColumbia, pushing up real estate costs and leading to dire predictions ofthe end of independent operators.52 This development was more often pre-dicted than realized, however, as independents copied and borrowed con-cepts from larger chains or positioned themselves in niches not yet exploited

Table 7.4

Fast food outlets in Canadian cities with over 100,000 people,selected chains, 1968

Outlets in TotalChain 100,000+ cities outlets %

A&W 63 184 34Baron de Boeuf 22 22 100Chicken Delight 23 33 70Dairy Queen (eastern Canada) 77 217 35Harvey’s 44 48 92Dog ’N Suds 16 32 50Red Barn 18 20 90Tastee Freez 6 11 55

Note: In 1966, 47 percent of Canadians lived in cities with over 100,000 people.Source: Canadian Hotel and Restaurant, 15 May 1968, 47-51.


by large companies. Indeed, on many suburban streets, the number of inde-pendent restaurants actually increased during the 1960s and 1970s. Drivingalong the typical drive-in strip until the 1980s was a lesson in what histori-ans call “combined and uneven development,” with many phases of drive-in commerce clustered together, competing for customers: olderindependents, longstanding local chains, extensive fast food companies,and newer independents all co-existed on the same strip (see Table 7.6).53

If fast food was homogenizing the Canadian roadside in the decade and ahalf after 1960, it was largely the result of many different companies andoperators pursuing their own regional, local, and independent paths of de-velopment. Yet they all shared the basic vision of selling by the carload –the larger companies by defining precise rules about traffic volume andvisibility, independents by the more commonsensical approach of openingon a busy strip. Whatever the precise strategy, however, a successful drive-in needed more than a big parking lot. As McDonald’s stressed when itarrived in Richmond, the population around the outlet was as important asthe number of cars going by. This reflected a broader truth in drive-in cul-ture: businesses positioned themselves to catch transient consumers whosemovements had been stretched out by the car, but everyone remained de-pendent on customers who were close to home. Based on a survey of mar-keting studies, the Financial Post claimed that “even along heavily traveledroutes, sales to through-travelers make up a much smaller portion of a com-munity’s total business activity than was formerly supposed. Even gasoline

Table 7.5

The hamburger’s gaze: Percentage of population livingoutside the potential reach of fast food, 1966

Place %

Prince Edward Island 100Yukon/Northwest Territories 100Newfoundland 81New Brunswick 72Saskatchewan 71Nova Scotia 61Alberta 49Manitoba 48British Columbia 47Quebec 38Ontario 34

Canada 44

Note: Figures represent the percentage of the population living in communitiesconsidered to be too small to support a fast food outlet (30,000 people).Source: 1966 Census of Canada, Population—Urban and Rural Distribution(Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1968), Table 14.

177Steve Penfold

stations, restaurants, and drive-in snack bars were found to be catering, to alarge extent, to nearby residents.”54 As different operators fanned out acrosscities and regions in search of “solid, substantial family communities,” theymade the fate of fast food into a social question.

“Why Don’t You Just Close Earlier?”Fast food companies trickled north of the border at exactly the time thatmany Canadians were filling their hungry stomachs with restaurant meals.Precise figures were not collected comprehensively and consistently, butevidence suggests a trend toward more eating-out from the late 1950sthrough the 1970s, at least among urban middle classes in more affluentregions. The trend was dramatic enough that in the late 1970s StatisticsCanada revised the Consumer Price Index to weight eating-out more heavilyin its calculations. Industry observers responded with excitement, althoughCanadian eating-out never reached the lofty heights predicted by hopefulcomparisons to the American market.55 Like the rise in car ownership, this(uneven) trend of eating-out was nurtured by broader social developments.A key market for quick-service restaurants was the increasing number offamilies where the mother worked for wages. Increasingly, families werevisiting restaurants or eating “take-out” meals, often in front of the televi-sion, as an alternative to mother’s cooking. Long before feminists broke

Table 7.6

Independent vs. chain restaurants

Location Year Independent Chain Total % Chain

Kingsway, Vancouvera 1954 9 0 9 01970 11 9 20 451980 15 10 25 40

8th Ave. East, Saskatoonb 1950 1 0 1 01960 6 3 9 331974 12 3 15 201989 23 11 34 32

Lundy’s Lane, Niagara Fallsc 1956 4 1 5 201964 6 2 8 251972 9 4 13 301975 13 5 18 281982 16 12 28 57

a From Willingdon Ave. in Burnaby to 10th Ave. in New Westminster.b From Cairns Ave. to city limits.c From Queen Elizabeth Way to Main Street.Notes: Dates chosen partly reflect availability of city directories at the Toronto ReferenceLibrary. % chain = restaurants as percentage of total restaurants on strip.Source: City directories, Toronto Reference Library.


into the mainstream with their critique of the double workday, restaura-teurs had realized that mothers (whether “working” or not) wanted nightsoff from cooking and appealed to their families with slogans like, in thecase of one Toronto drive-in, “Give Ma a Treat! Save Her Cooking a MealThis Week-End.”56

Of course, replacing maternal labour power with restaurant meals was easierthan ever for many Canadians since they had more money in their pocketsto spend. Real incomes almost doubled in the thirty years after the SecondWorld War. As usual, prosperity varied by class, gender, ethnicity, region,and other factors, but the booming economy lifted thousands of Canadiansinto the ranks of the mass consumer market, comprised of the section of thepopulace, from skilled workers to white-collar professionals, that was “nei-ther very rich nor poor,” owned cars and houses, shopped at supermarketsand plazas, and lived in nuclear families.57 Fast food companies worked hardto attract this middle market. “We look for churches and station wagons,”declared McDonald’s, a rule of thumb meant to symbolize the chain’s com-mitment to solid, stable, middle-income communities. Other companiesdescribed the same market in different ways. “In looking for lots,” L.H.Raymes, CEO of Dairy Queen Canada, commented, “we prefer a working ormiddle class neighborhood. Even if we could get a permit I don’t think we’dset up a Dairy Queen in Forest Hill.” For his part, Gordon Daly of P.K. Fishand Chips added ethnicity and regional difference to this basic vision: “Theremust be at least 12,000 people within [a] one-mile radius of the store; at least50% of them must be of Anglo-Saxon background and so used to eating fishand chips; the head of the average household must earn at least $7,500 ayear (this will be lowered for areas like the Maritimes); and the majority ofparents must be under 40 and so more likely to eat out with their youngfamilies.” Most often, however, differences of taste and background weresubordinated to income, housing choice, and family arrangement. HaroldShneer revealed Red Barn’s formula for success in similar detail, describingan almost perfect demographic representation of the postwar middle class:seek neighbourhoods of families with children aged six to eighteen living insingle-family homes valued at $15,000-$25,000 and with net household in-comes of $4,000-$10,000 per year.58 Of course, in the suburbs of the 1960sfew families earning $4,000 lived beside those earning $10,000, but withmarket areas of two to four miles, built around highly mobile, auto-boundcustomers, fast food companies sewed this broad middle market together.59

Yet middle-class families constantly complained about drive-ins. Asidefrom noise, traffic, and garbage, residents worried that outlets would be-come magnets for youth. From the 1950s through the 1970s the complaintsremained the same, even if the language changed. Anger over “hoodlums,”“gangs,” and “hot-rodders” in the 1950s and early 1960s linked to adultfears of juvenile delinquency.60 “The scream of tires and drag racing make it

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nearly impossible ... to sleep,” one suburban couple wrote. “We have seengangs with baseball bats and crowbars getting ready for a fight.”61 By thelate 1960s these concerns intersected with more updated symbols of thegeneration gap, especially drugs and long hair. Although less known thanthe stereotypical image of hippie haunts along downtown streets in Yorkvilleand Kitsilano, the long-haired invasion of suburban shopping plazas andfast food joints seemed in full swing by 1968. Bad behaviour and long hairbecame virtually indistinguishable in the suburban imagination. “All theadults around here,” complained one teen in Scarborough, Ontario, “if youdon’t have short hair, they think you’re nothing but a plaza bum.”62 Threeyears later Edmonton’s city solicitor complained of the “substantial percent-age of hippy, yippy and yappy customers” who gathered on weekend eve-nings at a Jasper Avenue drive-in restaurant.63

Whatever the era, the parking lot was the common flashpoint. In tryingto sell to the carload, fast food chains built enormous parking lots thatbecame spaces in their own right, facilitating all kinds of alternative activi-ties.64 In 1966 residents neighbouring a Harvey’s hamburger restaurant inScarborough protested parking lot pastimes like “basketball games using tincans for a ball and trashcans for a basket.” Another suburban newspaperlamented that parking lots had become replacements for parks. “A group ofeight boys were tossing a Frisbee around the parking lot of Tim Horton’sdonut shop until the cops came to break it up ... What Oakville needs issome kids space ... Just unstructured, open space to gather.”65 In other cases,complaints were more dramatic. Parking-lot fights between “gangs” of teen-agers at three Winnipeg drive-ins led to the end of all-night service. In NorthYork, Councillor Paul Godfrey’s personal campaign against “booze and sex”at drive-in restaurants led to almost one hundred letters of support fromlocal residents.66

Neighbourhood complaints raised troubling questions of marketing forfast food operators. In many ways, problems with youthful misbehaviourexpressed the internal contradictions of selling by the carload, a lethal com-bination of large parking lots, cheap food, and baby boomer kids growinginto self-directed and disrespectful youth. Large parking lots, while permit-ting fast food chains to sell by the roadside, also allowed young people tocongregate; families with two or three kids were soon matched by gangs ofrowdy youth. And middle-income communities meant that young peoplehad enough disposable income that they couldn’t just be ignored. Suburbanhot-rodders and hippies were attracted to drive-ins for the same reason astheir parents: the food was cheap, the service fast, the parking ample. It didn’thurt that automobiles provided semiprivate spaces for all kinds of illicit ac-tivities, although cars were never free of surveillance. When Vancouver po-lice began to check drive-in patrons for alcohol bottles and flasks, youthreportedly hid liquor in their cars, pouring small amounts into two-ounce


airline bottles to carry around the parking lot. As they turned to new inebri-ates later in the decade, the car served a similar purpose. “A check of a car inthe parking lot of a drive-in restaurant on Lakeshore Road early this morn-ing resulted in the arrest of a 22-year-old man on a charge of possession ofnarcotics,” Oakville’s Daily Journal Record reported in 1970.67

The constant claims of McDonald’s and other companies that they ranclean, family establishments need to be understood in light of these prob-lems. Yet to be effective, the business model of fast food had to include arange of subtle and explicit mechanisms of social control. At McDonald’s,Ray Kroc banned jukeboxes, telephone booths, cigarette machines, and fe-male employees, figuring that the combination would attract teenage boysand encourage hanging out. “We don’t want music screaming out attract-ing kids just out for kicks,” he commented during his first trip to the Rich-mond outlet.68 Fast food owners also published detailed codes of conductand occasionally hired off-duty police officers to enforce them. Othersbragged about their own masculine prowess (one independent operator inRichmond claimed to be a former professional wrestler to scare rowdy youth,and a North York donut shop owner claimed to be a semiprofessional boxer),while some simply resorted to blanket bans. In 1969 several Halifax-arearestaurants refused to serve long-haired patrons; a year later Tim Hortonarrived at his Oakville, Ontario, outlet to announce a new policy: “no hip-pies.” Suburban hippies responded to these kinds of actions by assertingtheir civil rights, using broader political ideas to claim access to consumerspaces. In the case of hippies, however, this rhetorical strategy faced realinstitutional limits: Nova Scotia’s government, for example, claimed that itcould do nothing about the bans since “appearance” was not listed in theHuman Rights Act.69 Whatever its legal status, rights-based language con-tinued to be powerful: in Oakville, one youth writer reminded Horton thatin “the early 1960s many restaurants in the southern states had similarpolicies dealing with black people.”70

Solving the youth problem was rarely as simple as banning shaggy pa-trons. Young people, especially in the suburbs, were a lucrative market oftheir own, with abundant leisure time and (at least in the minds of market-ers) considerable amounts of discretionary income, which they were morethan willing to spend on fast food. Reflecting on the changing dynamics ofeating-out in 1969, the president of the Canadian Restaurant Associationpointed to a troubling fact for drive-in operators who were anxious to reachthe family market: fourteen to twenty-two year olds had a taste for hot dogsand hamburgers and the money to buy them.71 Since neighbourhood angerdidn’t always distinguish between violence, immorality, and more inno-cent horseplay, keeping neighbours happy might mean driving good cus-tomers away. Forgoing a share of the youth market was easier for a chain

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like McDonald’s, which had high per-outlet revenues, but many smalleroperations had no such luxury.72

If the combination of economic power and rowdy behaviour caused mar-keting problems for operators, youthful misbehaviour raised more troublingregulatory questions for neighbourhoods and municipalities. In 1970 Oak-ville experienced a minor moral panic near a Country Style donut shop,including dramatic claims of “sexual intercourse on lawns” and “urinatingon sidewalks.” Since the parking lot itself was private property, the townresponded by passing an antiloitering bylaw that applied to nearby sidewalksand streets, hoping to empower local police to contain the immoral behav-iour. The bylaw became the source of not inconsiderable ridicule and con-cern among civil libertarians, not the least because its wording – whichbanned occupying sidewalks and streets outside private businesses – ap-peared to outlaw picketing.73

The law may have been an overreaction, but the problem was real. By allappearances, drive-in parking lots were public spaces, but in law they wereprivate property, over which operators had absolute control. If an ownerwas unwilling or unable to control youth on the lot, municipalities hadlittle recourse. Some threatened to revoke licences, but no one seemed sureabout whether they were empowered to do so. Scarborough police notedthat regular patrols of area drive-ins helped to contain problems, but thecosts were exorbitant and not really justified for a small number of privatebusinesses. Moreover, a constant surveillance was unrealistic: officers mightpass by to tell kids to quiet down or move along, but problems usuallyresurfaced once police drove on, if they arrived on time at all. “Last night, abunch of hot-rodders were tearing around Tim Horton’s donut shop formost of the evening,” the Daily Journal Record complained in 1971. “Finallythe police arrived. But all was quiet.”74

Moreover, some of the simplest ways to control youthful misbehaviour –like closing early – caused other problems. As Edmonton’s legal departmentnoted, noise levels that might not be noticed during the day became “ob-jectionable” at night,75 so city officials across the country pressed outlets toclose early. Conflict was almost automatic – operators wanted to stay openlate, while neighbourhoods wanted them to close early – and municipalcouncils had to balance competing claims within the limits of their legalpowers. In Richmond town officials issued the new McDonald’s a licenceonly when the company agreed to close at 11:00 p.m., but many operatorsobjected to similar procedures elsewhere, and even Richmond’s reeve ad-mitted that the town couldn’t block the outlet.76 In the longer term, munici-palities could alter zoning regulations, but once permits were granted andthe outlet was open, councils could only threaten and cajole. “We ... don’tknow the answer to this one,” complained Vancouver’s licence inspector in


1963. “I can not see any charges we can lay ... it is just a bunch of wild,exuberant kids making a racket.”77

These institutional limits reflected a broader ideological problem. MichaelDawson points out that debates about closing times were as much aboutpolitics as consumption, playing on notions of democracy and freedom.78

In a similar way, clashes over fast food outlets – both their use as consumerspaces and their hours of operation – expressed the longstanding tensionsof liberal capitalism. Municipal councils struggled to balance claims aboutthe community interest against the liberties accorded to private propertyand wondered how they might reconcile the “rights” of citizens to peaceand quiet with those of businesses and consumers to legitimate market ac-tivity. Not surprisingly, then, the debate often turned on the question oflegitimacy. While disgruntled neighbours and their sympathetic council-lors pointed to any and all evidence of “promiscuity,” fast food operators(and their sympathetic councillors) emphasized their family market, accusedpoliticians of exploiting complaints for electoral advantage, and claimed toserve customers with genuine night-time needs. “Why don’t you just closeearlier?” one Scarborough councillor asked George Sukornyk of Harvey’sbefore advocating a provincial law to make early closings mandatory. “Iguess we want to make money,” Sukornyk replied, noting that the late open-ing was for the benefit of shift workers, cabbies, and truckers, but “unfortu-nately we’ve attracted a lot of adult delinquents and children who shouldbe in bed.”79

A Drive-Thru NationCanadian fast food entered a new phase of development sometime around1975. McDonald’s climbed to the top of the Canadian fast food sector inlate 1974, when it passed perennial leader A&W in annual revenues, signal-ling the final triumph of self-serve over carhops (even A&W began to closeits older outlets and retreated to shopping-mall food courts).80 About thesame time, fast food menus began to expand. McDonald’s introduced itsbreakfast menu in 1976, followed by a series of additions from McNuggetsto salads, while other chains struggled to catch up.81 Fast food chains alsotranscended their original boundaries after 1975, growing beyond their sub-urban locations to enter downtown neighbourhoods, smaller towns, hospi-tals, zoos, subway stations, and universities. If these innovations pulled fastfood toward pedestrians, other changes plunged it deeper into car culture –particularly drive-thru windows (pioneered in Canada by Wendy’s in 1975)and outlets in highway service centres – altering the balance between road-side location and the social dynamics of selling by the carload.82

If these developments produced the familiar fast food landscape that weknow today, they also set it apart from the earlier phase of development,

183Steve Penfold

highlighting some important lessons for understanding the history of Cana-da’s consumer society. Selling by the carload combined several key dynam-ics in postwar Canada: affluence, American economic and cultural influence,creeping homogenization, the mythic reach of the new middle class, thecultural hegemony of the nuclear family, the triumph of the automobile,and generational conflicts over legitimate forms of leisure. The early yearsof Canadian fast food, however, signalled both the limits and potential ofpostwar consumption. While many of these dynamics spread across thecountry, the early history of fast food was not really a “national” story,except insofar as fringe populations in metropolitan and urban centres sharedsome broad economic and social developments.

These limits and potentials, moreover, raise questions beyond those occa-sioned by the making and marketing of particular commodities. For theresidents of Bennett Road, just as for George Tidball, there was no neatdivision between social, business, and political history: fast food operatorsspent as much time managing the social dynamics of suburban consump-tion as they did figuring out how to produce hamburgers; suburban resi-dents responded ambivalently to the business developments that weretransforming their communities; and municipal politicians struggled withinreal institutional limits to reconcile the conflicting impulses of liberal capi-talism. Everyone had to confront the basic fact that suburban hot-roddersand hippies were attracted to drive-ins for the same reason as their parents:cheap food, informal surroundings, and lots of parking. Selling, and living,by the carload was a complicated proposition.

Notes1 Tidball related this story retrospectively in BC Business, March 1993, 33. See also Vancouver

Province, 3 October 1968, 20, and 4 December 1968, 25. For background on the early de-velopment of McDonald’s in Canada, see John Love, McDonald’s: Behind the Arches (NewYork: Bantam Books, 1995), 419-22; Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s(New York: Contemporary Books, 1977), 161.

2 Quotation from Richmond Planning Department, The Brighouse Core Area, March 1976, 9.On No. 3 Road and the Brighouse commercial area, see also City of Richmond Archives,Town Planning Series, file 3613, Richmond Planning Department, Brighouse Commercialand Parking Study, 1964; City of Richmond Archives, Richmond Planning Department, Com-mercial Land Use Study, November 1972; City of Richmond Archives, Richmond Collection,GP345, Richmond Planning Department, Brighouse Commercial Core Area Parking Study,October 1978.

3 Richmond Review, 28 June 1967, 10. Richmond’s population more than doubled between1956 and 1966 (25,000 to 52,000). Children aged one to fourteen and adults aged twenty-five to forty-four (broadly speaking, baby boomers and their parents) were overrepresentedin the local population. Two-thirds of Richmond’s population fell into these categories,compared to about 55 percent for both greater Vancouver and all of British Columbia. Thearea also had an above average number of single detached houses that were owned by theiroccupants. See Dominion Bureau of Statistics (DBS), Census, Population Census Tracts, Cata-logue 92-615, App. B; DBS, Census, Households and Families, 1966, Catalogue 93-602, 93-610;


DBS, Census, Population – Age Groups, Catalogue 92-610, Table 22; DBS, Census, 1966, House-holds and Families – Dwellings by Structural Type and Tenure, Catalogue 93-602.

4 Richmond Review, 18 January 1967, 1. For more detail on town discussions of the outlet, seeTown of Richmond, Council Minutes, 1966, 1542, 1562, 1557; ibid., 1967, 4, 25; and Rich-mond Review, 21 December 1966, 1.

5 Canadian Business, May 1978, 34.6 Mississauga News, 22 May 1982, 7.7 On McDonald’s as an agent and symbol of globalization (and broader trends in popular

culture), see George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society, rev. ed. (Westport, CT: Pine ForgePress, 2004); James Wilson, Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, 2nd ed. (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2004); Joe Kincheloe, The Sign of the Burger: McDonald’s and theCulture of Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Tony Royle, Working forMcDonald’s in Europe: The Unequal Struggle (New York: Routledge, 2000); Maoz Azaryahu,“McIsrael? On the ‘Americanization of Israel,’” Israel Studies 5, 2 (2000): 41-64; Mark Alfino,ed., McDonaldization Revisited: Critical Essays on Consumer Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger,1998); Paul Ariès, Les Fils de McDo: La McDonaldisation du monde (Paris: Harmattan, 1997);and Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995).

8 Might’s Toronto Directory (Toronto: Might Directories Ltd., 1935); Victoria Daily Colonist, 2October 1947, 12. According to fast food experts, fish worked best as an add-on product ata hamburger stand (the Filet o’ Fish, introduced by McDonald’s in 1962 to appeal to Catho-lic customers on meatless Fridays, being the most famous example) since only one personout of four might appreciate the variety. If fish was the only product on a restaurant’smenu, the single fish eater was liable to be overruled by the rest of the group, who wouldinstead choose a restaurant like McDonald’s. On attempts to establish chains for fish andchips, see Foodservice and Hospitality (FSH), 12 September 1966, 5; Globe and Mail (GM), 6September 1969, B1, and 23 May 1979, 7; Canadian Hotel and Restaurant (CHR), 15 March1970, 27-31; and Marketing, 29 January 1973, 25. On the Filet o’ Fish, see Love, Behind theArches, 226-29.

9 Vancouver Province, 8 July 1964, 8; Canadian Hotel Review and Restaurant (CHRR), 15 January1964, 33.

10 B.A. Ratcliffe, “A Survey of the Drive-In Restaurant Industry in Vancouver with Guidelinesfor Streamlining an Installation,” (B.Comm. essay, University of British Columbia, 1968);James McLamore, The Burger King: James McLamore and the Building of an Empire (New York:McGraw Hill, 1997).

11 Ester Reiter, Making Fast Food: Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fryer (Montreal and King-ston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). On fast food systems, see CHRR, 15 January1968, 32-33, 15 May 1968, 44-51, 15 June 1969, 26, and 15 March 1971, 16-20; CanadianMagazine, 18 April 1970, 4; and Financial Post (FP), 12 October 1974, C1, C5.

12 Richmond Review, 18 January 1967, 1; Scarborough Mirror, 8 February 1967, 1. See also BramaleaGuardian, 27 January 1966, 1, and 3 February 1966, 2; GM, 25 July 1967, B5; and FSH, 29August 1966, 5, and 21 November 1966, 4.

13 Winnipeg Free Press, 30 August 1966, 3.14 On general issues of drive-in restaurants, see Chester Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile:

American Roadside Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985); Stan Luxemberg,Roadside Empires: How the Chains Franchised America (New York: Viking, 1985); Philip Langdon,Orange Roofs, Golden Arches (New York: Knopf, 1986); and John Jakle and Keith Sculle, FastFood: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1999).

15 Customers would order through a microphone and speaker, and a carhop would bring thefood to the car. This system had the added advantage of eliminating the use of horns andheadlights to page the carhop, practices that annoyed neighbouring residents. The first useof electronic ordering in a carhop drive-in appears to have been at The Dog House inWinnipeg in 1956; see FP, 15 September 1956, 31. A&W used this system extensively intothe 1970s.

16 In one 1973 Statistics Canada study, only 7.6 percent of franchised foodservice outletsreported offering a “car order pick up wicket,” the category closest to what we would now

185Steve Penfold

call a drive-thru window; see Statistics Canada, Franchising in Canada’s Food Service Industry(Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1973), Table 4. McDonald’s did not open its first drive-thruwindow (located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) until 1975. The chain later adopted thewindow as a chain-wide strategy. By 1995, 90 percent of McDonald’s freestanding units inthe United States had drive-thru windows; see Love, Behind the Arches, 390-91. Among thelarge chains, Wendy’s Hamburgers pioneered drive-thru lanes in 1970. The idea was a stand-ard part of a Wendy’s restaurant by the time the chain arrived in Canada in 1975; see D.Daryl Wyckoff and W. Earl Sasser, The Chain Restaurant Industry (Lexington, MA: LexingtonBooks, 1978), 100. The impact of drive-thrus in Canada is little studied, but see Borough ofEtobicoke, Restaurant Study, 1980, Borough of Etobicoke Planning Department, 1 April 1980,37-38 (Etobicoke is a suburb of Toronto).

17 Oakville Daily Journal Record (DJR), 8 May 1971, 8.18 See David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Wolfgang

Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space inthe Nineteenth Century (Leamington Spa, UK: Berg, 1986); and Stephen Kern, The Culture ofSpace and Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

19 F.H. Leacy, Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed. (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1983), seriesT147-194.

20 Newfoundland and Quebec were the exceptional provinces, at 0.72 and 0.98 cars per house-hold respectively in 1966; see DBS, The Motor Vehicle, Catalogue 53-203, Table 3. On carownership in this period, see also Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, The CanadianAutomotive Industry (Hull: Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 1956), 21,27; DBS, Prices Division, Consumer Expenditure Surveys Section, City Family Expenditure,1957 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1961), 20.

21 On the development of car culture in Canada, and government involvement in it, seeDimitry Anastakis, “Multilateralism, Nationalism, and Bilateral Free Trade: Competing Vi-sions of Canadian Economic and Trade Policy, 1945-70,” in this volume; Richard Harris,Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2004); G.T. Bloomfield, “No Parking Here to Corner: London Reshaped by the Automobile,1911-1961,” Urban History Review 17, 2 (October 1989): 139-58; and Stephen Davies, “Reck-less Walking Must Be Discouraged: The Automobile Revolution and the Shaping of Mod-ern Urban Canada,” Urban History Review 17, 2 (October 1989): 123-38.

22 Restaurants and Institutions (RI), September-October 1956, 23.23 Leacy, Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed.; Toronto Globe, 10 August 1920, 6; Warren

Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Auto Camp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press,1979).

24 CHRR, 15 February 1937, 16-17.25 Fountains in Canada, 15 May 1948, 20; Karen Dubinsky, The Second Greatest Disappointment:

Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1999). Motels didnot come to Canada in great numbers until the 1940s; see GM, 22 September 1953, 7.

26 In some cities, drive-in restaurants continued to close in the winter well into the 1960s. InSaskatoon, for example, it was still common practice to close in the winter until 1965; seeFSH, 20 December 1965, 3.

27 Vancouver Sun, 28 March 1978, 81; Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 26 June 1980, 22; CHRR, 15August 1937, 16-17, and 15 November 1947, 26, 28, 72; Leacy, Historical Statistics of Can-ada, 2nd ed.; Fountains in Canada, 15 May 1948, 20.

28 Bloomfield, “No Parking Here to Corner”; Liebs, Main Street.29 See, for example, RI, July 1959, 48. “Food-easy” was a play on the Prohibition-era term,

“speakeasy,” which referred to an underground drinking establishment.30 Toronto Globe, 22 April 1929, 10.31 Murray’s Restaurants began as a small sandwich shop on Queen Street East in Toronto in

1924 and had expanded to seventeen outlets in Ontario and Quebec by 1938 and to eighteenoutlets by 1955; see CHRR, 15 January 1938, 6-8, 16, and 15 February 1955, 7. Honey Dewwas a chain of self-service cafeterias (founded in 1926) with thirty-seven outlets across cen-tral and western Canada in 1937: three in British Columbia, one in Manitoba, twenty-five inOntario, and eight in Quebec. There were a few exceptions to this pattern of traditional


restaurants eschewing the drive-in market, but these tended to be local chains like Winni-peg’s Salsbury House (founded in 1931), which started as a downtown eatery and branchedout to drive-ins after the war. For a short time, Muirhead’s owned a drive-in restaurant onthe outskirts of Toronto, having purchased McKay’s Drive-In in 1946. The outlet was soldin 1950. See CHRR, 15 March 1936, 7, 27, 15 December 1946, 58, and 15 March 1950, 64;and Canadian Chain Store Association, “Submission to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations,” March 1938, 7.

32 Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 26 June 1980, 22; CHRR, 15 November 1947, 26, 28, 72.33 In 1951 Howard Johnson’s operated 255 restaurants spread across fifteen states, largely in

the northeast of the United States. Dairy Queen grew from 17 locations in 1947 to 800 in1950 and 2,100 in 1952. See Jakle and Sculle, Fast Food.

34 Fountains in Canada, 15 January 1959, 8, 10; Ralph Markarian, interviewed by author, St.Catharines, Ontario, 13 August 2001. Of course, many small operations were not so com-mitted to efficiency, especially in practice. “I am inclined to believe,” a University of Brit-ish Columbia student wrote in 1968 after surveying local hamburger drive-ins, “thatessentially a primitive process is being used”; see Ratcliffe, “Survey of the Drive-In,” 16. Itshould be noted, however, that Ratcliffe’s point of comparison for this conclusion was the“modern” automated hamburger machines (some quite bizarre in conception) that histhesis advocated.

35 FP, 31 January 1959, 22.36 RI, September 1964, 11.37 Canadian Business, May 1960, 132; CHRR, 15 August 1961, 36-40, 15 May 1964, 42-47, and

15 May 1966, 38-44; CHR, 15 May 1968, 44-51, 15 April 1969, 54, 15 March 1970, 43-49,and 15 March 1971, 20-23.

38 GM, 6 August 1970, B3.39 Canadian Business, May 1960, 131; CHRR, 15 August 1963, 50, and 15 February 1964, 33;

FP, 21 May 1966, 17, and 22 July 1974, F13; Love, Behind the Arches, 419-22.40 On Harvey’s, see RI, September 1964, 11; and FSH, 23 May 1966, 5, and 20 November 1967, 5.41 Douglas Hunter, Open Ice: The Tim Horton Story (Toronto: Viking, 1994).42 GM, 10 February 1971, B13; CHRR, 15 February 1964, 33-35, 50; RI, May 1965, 29.43 FP, 8 April 1967, 5.44 CHR, 15 May 1969, 24. In growing into international markets, McDonald’s came to believe

that playing too much to local tastes was distracting and unsuccessful; see Ian Brailsford,“US Image but NZ Venture: Americana and Fast-Food Advertising in New Zealand, 1971-1990,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 22, 2 (December 2003): 10-24. The companyhas, however, introduced local wrinkles and different products in many countries. There isa succinct summary of this tension in Royle, Working for McDonald’s, 27-30. See also JamesWatson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 2004).

45 Love, Behind the Arches, 419-22; GM, 10 February 1971, B13; FP, 12 October 1974, C5; FSH,October 1974, 17-20; Marketing, 16 April 1973, 42. On advertising to children, see KathleenToerpe, “Small Fry, Big Spender: McDonald’s and the Rise of Children’s Consumer Culture,1955-1985” (PhD thesis, Loyola University of Chicago, 1994).

46 Jakle and Sculle, Fast Food; Love, Behind the Arches; Michael Bliss, Northern Enterprise: FiveCenturies of Canadian Business (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), 496-97; VancouverProvince, 7 September 1967, 20.

47 CHRR, 15 December 1964, 50, and 15 September 1964, 59.48 CHR, 15 May 1966, 42.49 Note that for its early outlets, McCan Franchises leapfrogged from Greater Vancouver to

Calgary and Winnipeg; see CHR, 15 May 1969, 24. On Canada as an “urban archipelago,”see Cole Harris, “Regionalism and the Canadian Archipelago,” in L.D. McCann, ed., Heart-land and Hinterland: A Geography of Canada (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 395-421.

50 RI, May 1965, 30.51 The economic geography of fast food is further complicated by the fact that some of these

small communities (those under 30,000 people) were located reasonably close to a largercentre with a fast food outlet.

187Steve Penfold

52 GM, 6 August 1970, B3.53 The classic study of combined and uneven development looked at industry in Britain in the

nineteenth century; see Raphael Samuel, “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and HandTechnology in Mid-Victorian Britain,” History Workshop Journal 3 (Spring 1977): 6-72.

54 FP, 24 March 1962, 65. See also Robert O’Dell, “An Analysis of Land Use at Highway 401Interchanges between Toronto and London” (MA thesis, University of Guelph, 1974), 53-58; F.W. Boal and D.B. Johnson, “The Functions of Retail and Service Establishments onCommercial Ribbons,” Canadian Geographer 9, 3 (1965): 154-69.

55 Changes in the pattern of eating out are frustratingly elusive, as survey strategies shiftedover time (both in terms of who and what was asked), making direct comparisons difficult.Existing statistics do appear to indicate that industry observers were correct in identifyingan increase through the 1960s and 1970s. In 1953, for urban families in the middle-income range, 8.7 percent of the weekly total food dollar was spent on eat-out fare (if otherCanadians had been factored in, it is likely that the figure would have been lower); seeDBS, Urban Food Expenditure, 1953, Catalogue 62-511, 11. In 1969, in a survey that includeda broader geographic and income spectrum, the average Canadian spent about 17 percentof his or her food dollar away from home; see DBS, Family Food Expenditure in Canada,1969, Catalogue 62-531, Table 2. By 1982 the average Canadian reported spending 25.3percent of his or her food dollar at restaurants; see DBS, Family Food Expenditure in Canada,1986, Catalogue 62-531, Table 1. Note that food eaten out, food eaten away from home,and food eaten at restaurants are not exactly the same thing, so these figures are offered assuggestive rather than conclusive. At all points, moreover, the figures varied by income,region versus province, urban versus rural, and other factors. On the change in the Con-sumer Price Index, see FSH, February 1979, 8. On Canadian-American comparisons, notethat in the late 1970s Americans spent 35 percent of their food dollar eating out, whileCanadians still hadn’t reached this figure by as late as the early 1990s. Given the regionalvariations in Canada, however, a North American perspective that made regional compari-sons but ignored the 49th parallel might indicate more similarities than differences. Forsuggestive comments on the more subdued nature of postwar consumption in Canada, seeJoy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (To-ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 64-83.

56 “Give Ma a Treat,” Tasty Drive-In advertisement, Weston Times and Guide, 23 June 1960, 8.On take-out restaurants, see CHRR, 15 September 1955, 23-24; RI, July 1959, 28-29, 36; andFSH, 16 January 1967, 16.

57 Morgan Reid, quoted in FP, 21 February 1953, 32. On the postwar middle class, see AndrewHurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Con-sumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic:The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003). On theconnection between the mass market and family life, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 162-82; and HarveyLevenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1993), 101-18. On the limits of affluence, see Robert Rutherdale, “Fram-ing Fatherhood in Transition: Domesticity, Consumerism, and Resistance Narratives,” pa-per presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Quebec City,2000; Alvin Finkel, Our Lives: Canada after 1945 (Toronto: Lorimer, 1997), Chapter 1; andBryan Palmer, Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800-1991 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992), 305-7.

58 On McDonald’s, see John Love, Behind the Arches, 164; Raymes quoted in GM, 10 April 1969,B5; on PK Fish and Chips, see CHR, 15 September 1970, 10; for Red Barn’s market, see CHRR,15 February 1964, 34. Note that Forest Hill is an affluent area in the heart of Toronto.

59 S.D. Clark, The Suburban Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966); Harris, Creep-ing Conformity.

60 See, for example, Bramalea Guardian, 27 January 1966, 1, and 3 February 1966, 2; and NorthYork Mirror, 10 August 1966, 13. On juvenile delinquency and concerns about teens, seeDoug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: Uni-versity of Toronto Press, 1996), 136-58; Franca Iacovetta, “Parents, Daughters, and Family


Court Intrusions into Working-Class Life,” in Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson,eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998);and Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1997), 39-82.

61 North York Mirror, 20 July 1966, 3, quoting a letter to Councillor Paul Godfrey.62 Scarborough Mirror, 28 August 1968, 6. On hippies more generally, see Owram, Born at the

Right Time, 185-215.63 CHRR, 15 August 1971, 35.64 At shopping plazas, parking lots were so large that speeding became a problem, and pro-

vincial governments soon began to empower municipalities to enforce speed limits. See,for example, Province of Ontario, “An Act to Amend the Municipal Act,” 22 June 1965, 27(4), which empowered municipalities to set speed limits of fifteen miles per hour on pri-vately owned parking lots upon receiving a written request from the owner. On the broaderhistory of parking lots, see John Jakle and Keith Sculle, Lots of Parking: Land Use in CarCulture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).

65 DJR, 15 May 1971, 4.66 FSH, 21 November 1966, 4; North York Mirror, 20 July 1966, 3.67 Vancouver Province, 25 May 1963, 2; DJR, 14 December 1970, 1. Far too little of the growing

literature on drug use follows the story into suburban areas. This is unfortunate becausesmaller community newspapers often provide tantalizing – if sensationalist – clues aboutthe grey economy of drug distribution in suburban schools, drop-in and community cen-tres, and other places.

68 Richmond Review, 26 July 1967, 13; Vancouver Province, 20 July 1967, 12. During a labourshortage in the United States in 1968, Kroc relented and agreed to hire women; see Love,Behind the Arches, 291-93.

69 Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 9 July 1969, 9, and 10 July 1969, 20. On the broader import ofrights-based language in this period, see Owram, Born at the Right Time, 166-67.

70 Oakville Beaver, 29 October 1970, A28. The analogy between hippies in the suburbs ofToronto and African Americans in the Jim Crow South is stretched to say the least, but itspeaks to both the power of civil rights language in this period and to the link betweenrights and consumption. Mark Weiner explores the relationship between consumer sym-bols and civil rights campaigns in his “Consumer Culture and Participatory Democracy:The Story of Coca Cola during World War Two,” in Carole Connihan, ed., Food in the USA(New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 123-42.

71 GM, 27 March 1969, B3. On youth as consumers more generally, see FP, 21 May 1966, 13;Serge Gouin, Bernard Portis, and Brian Campbell, The Teenage Market in Canada: A Study ofHigh School Students in London, Ontario, and Chicoutimi, Quebec (London, ON: School ofBusiness Administration, University of Western Ontario, 1967); and Ratcliffe, “Survey ofthe Drive-In.”

72 In May 1971, McDonald’s sought permission to open its Richmond outlet until midnight.Town Council agreed, but on a trial basis for that summer. Town of Richmond, CouncilMinutes, 1971, 810-11, 850. A year later, Council made the change permanent, noting that“the establishment has not been the source of annoyance as no complaints have beenreceived.” Town of Richmond, Council Minutes, 1972, 257-58. However, at other outlets,the declared willingness of McDonald’s to forego the rowdy youth market never translatedinto the complete absence of rowdy youth; see, for example, DJR, 8 May 1971, 8.

73 DJR, 14 December 1970, 1; Town of Oakville, Bylaws of the Town of Oakville, 1970-98, “ABy-Law to Prohibit Loitering and Nuisances on Public Highways,” passed 7 July 1970; OakvilleBeaver, 2 July 1970, 1, and 22 October 1970, A8. A Toronto Star editorial, 8 July 1970, 13,mocked the town for passing a “bonehead bylaw.” The local Labour Council also protestedthe new bylaw, but with little effect.

74 DJR, 31 May 1971, 4.75 FSH, 15 August 1971, 35.76 See above, note 4.77 Vancouver Province, 6 March 1963, 3.

189Steve Penfold

78 Michael Dawson, “Leisure, Consumption, and the Public Sphere: Postwar Debates overShopping Regulations in Vancouver and Victoria during the Cold War,” in this volume.

79 Scarborough Mirror, 31 August 1966, 4. On accusations of exploiting complaints, see NorthYork Mirror, 3 August 1966, 6, where one independent operator charged that “one of ourambitious politicians is using some of these complaints in addition to an imaginary one ofhis own as a vehicle to enhance his career.”

80 FSH, September 1974, S2, and October 1974, 18-19; Canadian Business, May 1978, 32-36,and March 1982, 110-11; GM, 3 December 1977, B13.

81 Marketing, 21 June 1976, 2.82 FSH, October 1974, 18-19; CHR, November 1975, 46. In 1980 one suburban planning study

noted that drive-thru customers were generating 51 percent of the vehicle trips to thearea’s two Wendy’s restaurants and 37 percent of such trips to McDonald’s; see Borough ofEtobicoke, Restaurant Study, 1980, Borough of Etobicoke Planning Department, 1 April 1980,37-38.

Selling by the Carload: The Early Years of Fast Food in C

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